Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0

W3C Recommendation 10-February-1998

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REC-xml-19980210

This version:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210.xml
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210.pdf
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210.ps
Latest version:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml
Previous version:
http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-xml-971208
Editors:
Tim Bray (Textuality and Netscape) mailto:tbray@textuality.com
Jean Paoli (Microsoft) mailto:jeanpa@microsoft.com
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (University of Illinois at Chicago) mailto:cmsmcq@uic.edu
Abstract

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.

Status of this document

This document has been reviewed by W3C Members and other interested parties and has been endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation. It is a stable document and may be used as reference material or cited as a normative reference from another document. W3C's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability of the Web.

This document specifies a syntax created by subsetting an existing, widely used international text processing standard (Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879:1986(E) as amended and corrected) for use on the World Wide Web. It is a product of the W3C XML Activity, details of which can be found at http://www.w3.org/XML. A list of current W3C Recommendations and other technical documents can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR.

This specification uses the term URI, which is defined by [Berners-Lee et al.], a work in progress expected to update [IETF RFC1738] and [IETF RFC1808].

The list of known errors in this specification is available at http://www.w3.org/XML/xml-19980210-errata.

Please report errors in this document to xml-editor@w3.org.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
    1.1 Origin and Goals
    1.2 Terminology
2. Documents
    2.1 Well-Formed XML Documents
    2.2 Characters
    2.3 Common Syntactic Constructs
    2.4 Character Data and Markup
    2.5 Comments
    2.6 Processing Instructions
    2.7 CDATA Sections
    2.8 Prolog and Document Type Declaration
    2.9 Standalone Document Declaration
    2.10 White Space Handling
    2.11 End-of-Line Handling
    2.12 Language Identification
3. Logical Structures
    3.1 Start-Tags, End-Tags, and Empty-Element Tags
    3.2 Element Type Declarations
        3.2.1 Element Content
        3.2.2 Mixed Content
    3.3 Attribute-List Declarations
        3.3.1 Attribute Types
        3.3.2 Attribute Defaults
        3.3.3 Attribute-Value Normalization
    3.4 Conditional Sections
4. Physical Structures
    4.1 Character and Entity References
    4.2 Entity Declarations
        4.2.1 Internal Entities
        4.2.2 External Entities
    4.3 Parsed Entities
        4.3.1 The Text Declaration
        4.3.2 Well-Formed Parsed Entities
        4.3.3 Character Encoding in Entities
    4.4 XML Processor Treatment of Entities and References
        4.4.1 Not Recognized
        4.4.2 Included
        4.4.3 Included If Validating
        4.4.4 Forbidden
        4.4.5 Included in Literal
        4.4.6 Notify
        4.4.7 Bypassed
        4.4.8 Included as PE
    4.5 Construction of Internal Entity Replacement Text
    4.6 Predefined Entities
    4.7 Notation Declarations
    4.8 Document Entity
5. Conformance
    5.1 Validating and Non-Validating Processors
    5.2 Using XML Processors
6. Notation

Appendices

A. References
    A.1 Normative References
    A.2 Other References
B. Character Classes
C. XML and SGML (Non-Normative)
D. Expansion of Entity and Character References (Non-Normative)
E. Deterministic Content Models (Non-Normative)
F. Autodetection of Character Encodings (Non-Normative)
G. W3C XML Working Group (Non-Normative)


1. Introduction

Extensible Markup Language, abbreviated XML, describes a class of data objects called XML documents and partially describes the behavior of computer programs which process them. XML is an application profile or restricted form of SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language [ISO 8879]. By construction, XML documents are conforming SGML documents.

XML documents are made up of storage units called entities, which contain either parsed or unparsed data. Parsed data is made up of characters, some of which form character data, and some of which form markup. Markup encodes a description of the document's storage layout and logical structure. XML provides a mechanism to impose constraints on the storage layout and logical structure.

A software module called an XML processor is used to read XML documents and provide access to their content and structure. It is assumed that an XML processor is doing its work on behalf of another module, called the application. This specification describes the required behavior of an XML processor in terms of how it must read XML data and the information it must provide to the application.

1.1 Origin and Goals

XML was developed by an XML Working Group (originally known as the SGML Editorial Review Board) formed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1996. It was chaired by Jon Bosak of Sun Microsystems with the active participation of an XML Special Interest Group (previously known as the SGML Working Group) also organized by the W3C. The membership of the XML Working Group is given in an appendix. Dan Connolly served as the WG's contact with the W3C.

The design goals for XML are:

  1. XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
  2. XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
  3. XML shall be compatible with SGML.
  4. It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
  5. The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero.
  6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
  7. The XML design should be prepared quickly.
  8. The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
  9. XML documents shall be easy to create.
  10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

This specification, together with associated standards (Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 for characters, Internet RFC 1766 for language identification tags, ISO 639 for language name codes, and ISO 3166 for country name codes), provides all the information necessary to understand XML Version 1.0 and construct computer programs to process it.

This version of the XML specification may be distributed freely, as long as all text and legal notices remain intact.

1.2 Terminology

The terminology used to describe XML documents is defined in the body of this specification. The terms defined in the following list are used in building those definitions and in describing the actions of an XML processor:

may
Conforming documents and XML processors are permitted to but need not behave as described.
must
Conforming documents and XML processors are required to behave as described; otherwise they are in error.
error
A violation of the rules of this specification; results are undefined. Conforming software may detect and report an error and may recover from it.
fatal error
An error which a conforming XML processor must detect and report to the application. After encountering a fatal error, the processor may continue processing the data to search for further errors and may report such errors to the application. In order to support correction of errors, the processor may make unprocessed data from the document (with intermingled character data and markup) available to the application. Once a fatal error is detected, however, the processor must not continue normal processing (i.e., it must not continue to pass character data and information about the document's logical structure to the application in the normal way).
at user option
Conforming software may or must (depending on the modal verb in the sentence) behave as described; if it does, it must provide users a means to enable or disable the behavior described.
validity constraint
A rule which applies to all valid XML documents. Violations of validity constraints are errors; they must, at user option, be reported by validating XML processors.
well-formedness constraint
A rule which applies to all well-formed XML documents. Violations of well-formedness constraints are fatal errors.
match
(Of strings or names:) Two strings or names being compared must be identical. Characters with multiple possible representations in ISO/IEC 10646 (e.g. characters with both precomposed and base+diacritic forms) match only if they have the same representation in both strings. At user option, processors may normalize such characters to some canonical form. No case folding is performed. (Of strings and rules in the grammar:) A string matches a grammatical production if it belongs to the language generated by that production. (Of content and content models:) An element matches its declaration when it conforms in the fashion described in the constraint "Element Valid".
for compatibility
A feature of XML included solely to ensure that XML remains compatible with SGML.
for interoperability
A non-binding recommendation included to increase the chances that XML documents can be processed by the existing installed base of SGML processors which predate the WebSGML Adaptations Annex to ISO 8879.
2. Documents

A data object is an XML document if it is well-formed, as defined in this specification. A well-formed XML document may in addition be valid if it meets certain further constraints.

Each XML document has both a logical and a physical structure. Physically, the document is composed of units called entities. An entity may refer to other entities to cause their inclusion in the document. A document begins in a "root" or document entity. Logically, the document is composed of declarations, elements, comments, character references, and processing instructions, all of which are indicated in the document by explicit markup. The logical and physical structures must nest properly, as described in "4.3.2 Well-Formed Parsed Entities".

2.1 Well-Formed XML Documents

A textual object is a well-formed XML document if:

  1. Taken as a whole, it matches the production labeled document.
  2. It meets all the well-formedness constraints given in this specification.
  3. Each of the parsed entities which is referenced directly or indirectly within the document is well-formed.

Document
[1]  document ::= prolog element Misc*

Matching the document production implies that:

  1. It contains one or more elements.
  2. There is exactly one element, called the root, or document element, no part of which appears in the content of any other element. For all other elements, if the start-tag is in the content of another element, the end-tag is in the content of the same element. More simply stated, the elements, delimited by start- and end-tags, nest properly within each other.

As a consequence of this, for each non-root element C in the document, there is one other element P in the document such that C is in the content of P, but is not in the content of any other element that is in the content of P. P is referred to as the parent of C, and C as a child of P.

2.2 Characters

A parsed entity contains text, a sequence of characters, which may represent markup or character data. A character is an atomic unit of text as specified by ISO/IEC 10646 [ISO/IEC 10646]. Legal characters are tab, carriage return, line feed, and the legal graphic characters of Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646. The use of "compatibility characters", as defined in section 6.8 of [Unicode], is discouraged.

Character Range
[2]  Char ::= #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF] /* any Unicode character, excluding the surrogate blocks, FFFE, and FFFF. */

The mechanism for encoding character code points into bit patterns may vary from entity to entity. All XML processors must accept the UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings of 10646; the mechanisms for signaling which of the two is in use, or for bringing other encodings into play, are discussed later, in "4.3.3 Character Encoding in Entities".

2.3 Common Syntactic Constructs

This section defines some symbols used widely in the grammar.

S (white space) consists of one or more space (#x20) characters, carriage returns, line feeds, or tabs.

White Space
[3]  S ::= (#x20 | #x9 | #xD | #xA)+

Characters are classified for convenience as letters, digits, or other characters. Letters consist of an alphabetic or syllabic base character possibly followed by one or more combining characters, or of an ideographic character. Full definitions of the specific characters in each class are given in "B. Character Classes".

A Name is a token beginning with a letter or one of a few punctuation characters, and continuing with letters, digits, hyphens, underscores, colons, or full stops, together known as name characters. Names beginning with the string "xml", or any string which would match (('X'|'x') ('M'|'m') ('L'|'l')), are reserved for standardization in this or future versions of this specification.

Note: The colon character within XML names is reserved for experimentation with name spaces. Its meaning is expected to be standardized at some future point, at which point those documents using the colon for experimental purposes may need to be updated. (There is no guarantee that any name-space mechanism adopted for XML will in fact use the colon as a name-space delimiter.) In practice, this means that authors sh